A Shepherds Life | Page 6

which was preserved by the close, hard
turf is blown or washed away, and the soil becomes poorer year by year,
in spite of dressing, until it is hardly worth cultivating. Clover may be
grown on it but it continues to deteriorate; or the tenant or landlord may
turn it into a rabbit-warren, the most fatal policy of all. How hideous

they are--those great stretches of downland, enclosed in big wire fences
and rabbit netting, with little but wiry weeds, moss, and lichen growing
on them, the earth dug up everywhere by the disorderly little beasts!
For a while there is a profit--"it will serve me my time," the owner
says--but the end is utter barrenness.
One must lament, too, the destruction of the ancient earth-works,
especially of the barrows, which is going on all over the downs, most
rapidly where the land is broken up by the plough. One wonders if the
ever-increasing curiosity of our day with regard to the history of the
human race in the land continues to grow, what our descendants of the
next half of the century, to go no farther, will say of us and our
incredible carelessness in the matter! So small a matter to us, but one
which will, perhaps, be immensely important to them! It is, perhaps,
better for our peace that we do not know; it would not be pleasant to
have our children's and children's children's contemptuous expressions
sounding in our prophetic ears. Perhaps we have no right to complain
of the obliteration of these memorials of antiquity by the plough; the
living are more than the dead, and in this case it may be said that we are
only following the Artemisian example in consuming (in our daily
bread) minute portions of the ashes of our old relations, albeit
untearfully, with a cheerful countenance. Still one cannot but
experience a shock on seeing the plough driven through an ancient,
smooth turf, curiously marked with barrows, lynchetts, and other
mysterious mounds and depressions, where sheep have been pastured
for a thousand years, without obscuring these chance hieroglyphs
scored by men on the surface of the hills.
It is not, however, only on the cultivated ground that the destruction is
going on; the rabbit, too, is an active agent in demolishing the barrows
and other earth-works. He burrows into the mound and throws out
bushels of chalk and clay, which is soon washed down by the rains; he
tunnels it through and through and sometimes makes it his village; then
one day the farmer or keeper, who is not an archaeologist, comes along
and puts his ferrets into the holes, and one of them, after drinking his
fill of blood, falls asleep by the side of his victim, and the keeper sets to
work with pick and shovel to dig him out, and demolishes half the

barrow to recover his vile little beast.

CHAPTER II
SALISBURY AS I SEE IT
The Salisbury of the villager--The cathedral from the meadows--Walks
to Wilton and Old Sarum--The spire and a rainbow--Charm of Old
Sarum--The devastation--Salisbury from Old Sarum--Leland's
description--Salisbury and the village mind--Market-day--The
infirmary--The cathedral--The lesson of a child's desire--In the streets
again--An Apollo of the downs
To the dwellers on the Plain, Salisbury itself is an exceedingly
important place--the most important in the world. For if they have seen
a greater--London, let us say--it has left but a confused, a
phantasmagoric image on the mind, an impression of endless
thoroughfares and of innumerable people all apparently in a desperate
hurry to do something, yet doing nothing; a labyrinth of streets and
wilderness of houses, swarming with beings who have no definite
object and no more to do with realities than so many lunatics, and are
unconfined because they are so numerous that all the asylums in the
world could not contain them. But of Salisbury they have a very clear
image: inexpressibly rich as it is in sights, in wonders, full of
people--hundreds of people in the streets and market-place--they can
take it all in and know its meaning. Every man and woman, of all
classes, in all that concourse, is there for some definite purpose which
they can guess and understand; and the busy street and market, and red
houses and soaring spire, are all one, and part and parcel too of their
own lives in their own distant little village by the Avon or Wylye, or
anywhere on the Plain. And that soaring spire which, rising so high
above the red town, first catches the eye, the one object which gives
unity and distinction to the whole picture, is not more distinct in the
mind than the entire Salisbury with its manifold interests and activities.
There is nothing in the architecture of England more beautiful than that

same spire. I have